As processing and network technologies becomes progressively more advanced, the demand for software capable of taking full advantage of these advances correspondingly rises. However, many organizations dependent on information technology are struggling to manage complex heterogeneous environments that incorporate distributed and disparate hardware, software, applications, networks, and database systems. Thus, there has been an increasing demand and need for information resources and software that is flexible, robust, and easily upgraded and customized. Moreover, it is desirable for these systems to be hardware independent, support multiple users and hardware platforms, and be based on a distributed architecture.
There have been many attempts in the prior art to provide such an adequate information system. These systems, however, have been based on proprietary code that is hardware dependent, inflexible, difficult to upgrade, and difficult to maintain. An example of one such prior art system is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,839,822 which discloses an expert system for use in treating various types of trauma. This prior art expert system is a diagnostic system which is used to recommend a course of treatment based on information input from the user. The system achieves this result primarily through the use of a knowledge base and an inference engine. The software uses the well known Personal Consultant Plus inference engine, along with the Structured Query Language (SQL) database engine and the Essential Graphics software package. Based on the information input from the user, the inference engine receives information from the knowledge base which includes a collection of rules and parameter descriptions, upon which the treatment is suggested.
This prior art system, however, suffers from several shortcomings. Since the software is written in Microsoft C, upgrading or rewriting the code is significantly difficult and time consuming. For example, a rewrite of the code in order to use a different inference engine or a different database server would consume considerable time and effort. Moreover, the portability of the software is very limited. Due to inherent limitations of the C programming language, different versions of the software must be compiled for each different type of client computer used. An additional drawback to this type of software is how the data is stored. The data in a SQL, relational database, for example, is stored in tables made up of rows and columns of records. In order to access this data, the methods for accessing it must be coded separately from the data.
Other prior art information systems known to applicants suffer similar drawbacks in that they generally accomplish their goals at the expense of cross platform capability, software maintainability, and cumbersome data retrieval and storage. This is so even though more flexible programming languages, such as Java, by Sun Microsystems, have been developed and even though the use of inference engines has increased. Therefore, it would be desirable to create a more flexible development and deployment system for software functionality across an organization, as well as systems that are more robust, flexible, maintainable, upgradable, and cross-platform capable than currently available in the prior art. Just such a solution to the problems noted above and more, is made possible by our invention.